KIRKUS REVIEW

A leading litigator
engagingly explores what many readers already know: the Supreme Court votes
along party lines.

In this highly
knowledgeable and entirely accessible book, Zirin (The Mother Court: Tales
of Cases that Mattered in America’s Greatest Trial Court, 2014) shows that
what many readers thought they knew about our nation’s highest court only
touched the surface. At the beginning, the author apologizes to all-knowing
attorneys for his brief but comprehensive history of the court. This is not
just a list of famous cases, but rather explanations of their origins and
far-reaching results. Many of us knew Marbury v. Madison established
judicial review, but Zirin explains how President John Adams’ “midnight
appointments” at the end of his term set it off. Politically motivated
decisions are not especially new; the Lochner era represented 40 years of the court
tilting toward big business to strike down New Deal legislation. Zirin notes
that traditional tools of judicial analysis—text, meaning, original
understanding, and precedents—are supposed to be the criteria to say what the
law is. The use of originalism, textualism, and natural law skews those tools,
bending them to what the justice wants them to mean. The author cites Citizens
United, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Bush v. Gore as
modern cases of a highly partisan ilk, and he agrees with historians who claim
that Dred Scott was a principal cause of the Civil War. It not
only denied a slave’s humanity, but also declared the Missouri Compromise
unconstitutional. The chapters on the current justices—including the Catholic
Seat (five are Catholic), the Jewish (three are Jewish), the Female, the Black,
and now the Latina Seat—are crisp, insightful, and spot-on.

A top-notch book about the
Supreme Court. Zirin has his finger on its pulse, and he shows the rest of us
how it works and how it doesn’t.

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